What is average size of files read to memory when playing games?

[Tar2010]

Hi guys

Im doing some research and testing on SSD's for gaming and I wonder what the average file size of files being read to memory when playing games is?
I know this will be different from games to games, but it would be nice to know what the most normal size is.

I know read speed is the most critical element when playing games when it come to SSD's, but performance on reading 512K files is something completely different than reading 4k files.

I remember reading something about this a long time ago and what I read then was that the average size was something like 128K, but I cant find any info on google or anywhere about this.

Maybe Im a lousy searcher but if someone have some info about this or know where I should look please share the info

Thanks for any help

 

[CuriousMike]

Often times, games don't have a lot of loose files sitting on disk; rather, they have a few, large packed files.

 

[Tar2010]

Often times, games don't have a lot of loose files sitting on disk; rather, they have a few, large packed files.

ok that can be true. So you think there is no reason to think that some file sizes is more common than others when it comes to games?

So when searching for a good gaming SSD I should look at all the read tests no matter what file size they test?

 

[CuriousMike]

I don't have any hard evidence one way or another.
I will say: If they pack 2,000 files into a single packed file, there is still access within that 1 large file.

Maybe your google should be "SSD impact on game load times" (or "SSD shootout loading Battlefield 3") and see if you can find a game you care about listed.

 

[Lonyo]

No point caring too much about a "gaming" SSD unless you want an extra few seconds off your load time.
SSDs don't really impact gaming performance other than loading times.

When you are playing games, everything should already be in the RAM except for level loading. If you don't have enough RAM, it would be better to invest in that rather than an SSD if it's just for gaming.

 

[flexy]

For some games, SSDs have a huge impact on loading times (obviously) but also overall perceived "performance".

Many games have caching mechanisms where parts of the game, when accessed for the first time, are written to disk. Example Diablo III. When this happens it can cause massive stutters on a conventional HD until the data is read/written. When I put D3 on a SSD I don't see this problem.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

Often times, games don't have a lot of loose files sitting on disk; rather, they have a few, large packed files.

Quite often the case with modern games, they come with their own internal resource management where they take large archives on disk and have their own internal management, when looking for game load times from SSDs you ought to be looking at the performance of contiguous read speeds.

Often times the SSD is bottlenecked by something else, I've tried loading quite a lot of games from RAMDisks in the past and seen negligible benefit from doing so, I think the number crunching the CPU is doing at load time is often a bottleneck even with high overclocks (i7's @ 5Ghz) so it's not something I'd seriously stress over.

 

[Markbnj]

The short answer is there are probably not simple metrics you can discover that will apply across all games. The bulk of the data moved from disk to memory in a typical game will be assets: sound, video, and texture files. Each of these types of data have to be handled differenty. Sound is usually loaded into a buffer and pumped word by word to a DAC. Video could be loaded into a buffer or streamed from disk. Texture files have to get moved into system memory, and then paged over to the GPUs RAM as required by the current scene. As PrincessFrosty says any sophisticated game engine will have its own framework for managing all these tasks and making efficient use of system resources.

 

[Savatar]

For what it's worth, I've seen a huge impact on some MMOs with an SSD... The Secret World, specifically for example, loads much more quickly when changing zones. On a Samsung 830 SSD it takes about 10 seconds, whereas on my physical HDD it takes about 30 seconds. That's a pretty big difference. However, the install of TSW is huge (~40-50 GB).

The majority of games play just fine on a regular HDD, though, and I only install things to the SSD when desired to avoid too many writes - which lowers the lifespan. Consoles still have regular HDDs, and since they are one of the big driving forces for the gaming industry, we're unlikely to see games really 'require' SSDs any time soon - which means performance should be acceptable on HDDs for the foreseeable future. However, SSDs do a lot lower boot times and load times when you are able to take advantage of them... so they are a 'nice to have' component.

I agree with what PrincessFrosty said above, look for SSDs with high read speeds according to reviews and benchmarks in order to get the most out of them. The top end consumer SSDs should offer you >= 500 MBps, which is roughly 5x more than what you'll see from HDDs. Write speeds are less important once things get installed and initialized, unless you are running real-time databases or doing heavy development with lots of compilation activities (stuff like that).

 

[Tar2010]

Thanks for reply's guys

As a layman I will conclude so far that if you are looking for a great SSD for file intensive games like MMO's and sandbox games, look or this stats:

Random read speed all sizes
Random write 4k-32k

I base this on disk activity for MMO's and sandbox games. This is often games that take a lot of hard disk space (Age of conan 30 GB, planetside2 13GB, Guildwars 2 16GB) and where smaller files is read to memory almost continuously depending on where you are moving and doing. This type of games will benefit great from SSD's. It should increase load speed, stuttering, lag like effects and overall smoothness and framerate.

For other more streamlined singelplayer games like Diablo III and medal of honor maybe sequential read is as important as random read since the games is progression in predetermined smaller maps. The benefit from SSD's is less significant but load speed should increase.

But again, Im just a layman searching for answers to increase performance so I can be wrong here, but I think Im atleast on to something.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

I agree with what PrincessFrosty said above, look for SSDs with high read speeds according to reviews and benchmarks in order to get the most out of them. The top end consumer SSDs should offer you >= 500 MBps, which is roughly 5x more than what you'll see from HDDs.

Note that load times aren't 1/5th of HDD speeds though, this mirrors my experience that while a SSD will easily beat a HDD in load times, moving to a MUCH faster form of memory, such as a RAM disk which has many GB/sec of transfer speed, you don't gain any significant benefit.

I'd conclude that transfer speeds of HDDs is a bottleneck for a lot of game load times, but difference in read speeds of SSDs don't matter all that much, at some point with SSD speeds you simply run into CPU bottlenecks, quite where that is exactly I'm not sure, it would change from game to game but probably somewhere between the traditional 70-100 MB/sec of a HDD and 550MB/Sec of a high end SSD. It would also depend on the CPU speed, but I was testing on a i7 2600k @ 4.9Ghz so...

I would however still advocate for as fast as possible speeds with SSD, they're much better for everything in general, just general OS usage, file copying etc, and the performance ones don't tend to carry a huge premium.

 

[The Day Dreamer]

It varies from game to game. I don't really thing that performance matters that much ? Is it ?

 

[shortylickens]

Often times, games don't have a lot of loose files sitting on disk; rather, they have a few, large packed files.

As an example: Guild Wars is just an executable, and a single HUGE data file.
Thats it, nothing else.